DENVER — Together, Jonathan Moyer and Collin Meisel don’t have a crystal ball, but their research may just be the next best thing. The pair, who are the heart of the Diplometrics program in the University of Denver’s Institute of International Studies, spend their days mining data, modeling outcomes and pontificating about the what-ifs, encapsulating their findings into indices and information used by some major government players.
Through the Diplometrics program at the Frederick S. Pardee Institute for International Futures, with the help of roughly 40 part-time graduate and undergraduate research assistants and four full time staff, “they build data on diplomatic exchanges, security related interactions, economic interaction such as trade, and we try to find out what all that means for shifting geopolitical dynamics usually related to power and influence in the international system,” Meisel said.
Formally, diplometrics is defined as a program that “seeks to better understand and measure relationships in the international system by gathering data, building tools, and conducting analysis. The project identifies international interactions that measure the depth and breadth of political, diplomatic, economic, security, and cultural ties between countries.”
“The vision for the diplometrics program in the Pardee Institute is improving our shared understanding of the macro-level drivers of international relations,” Moyer said. “What is the best understanding we have about the things that matter for foreign policy over the next 30 years? And how can we improve and enhance that? It’s understanding networks, hard-to- measure things like power and likelihood of conflict and how dynamics of influence are changing.”
Moyer, an assistant professor at DU and director of the Pardee Institute, created the program 12 years ago when he was working on his dissertation, which focused on using models to forecast the future of international patterns of conflict and cooperation. He wanted to see where the world would likely see more wars, and if there was a quantitative reason why.
“In the past, the way this work had been done, it would produce a probabilistic measure, for example, the U.S. and China have 1% chance of having a war next year, and it’s based on a predictive model that’s developed using historical relationships … I did something less statistically orthodox, and was producing measures of indices, trying to measure something that was really hard to measure, like how cooperative are the two countries, how conflictual are the two countries, what’s the shared culture? Can you measure it in a way that is straight-forward and tells a story that can help connect the policy space with the academic rigor? From there, I started working with policymakers.”
Six years ago, Meisel came on board, and with student researchers, they are working to not only update publicly available data, but also to broaden their work for public consumption.
They study topics ranging from gross domestic product to exports between countries, anything, really, that measures intergovernmental relations in the future.
In 2023, they authored a paper in which they analyzed geopolitical influence based on four different world potential scenarios, beginning with the war on Ukraine and ending with U.S.-China competition through 2045. More recently, Meisel completed a look at the number of global atrocities in different countries. They’ll even study climate change.
“It’s not just important in terms of A to B, it’s how do all interact with others and how do we expect that to unfold across the long-term future and long-term scenarios?” Meisel said. “We don’t predict, but we do scenario analyses where we try to say if a catastrophic event were to happen, what do we think the outcomes may be, and why do we think so? We’re focused on understanding and very little prediction.”
Want to learn how much global influence the U.S. and China have? The pair created the Formal Bilateral Influence Capacity Index based on the volume of interactions between the countries between 1960 and 2020, determining an overall “influence capacity.”
“I think that is the most surprising thing we’ve ever done, because it behaves so well and does an incredible job of pretty accurately measuring how states influence each other and which states have more influence over time,” Moyer said in response the question of the one thing that has surprised him the most in his research. “I keep pinching myself, this can’t work that well, but it works well.”
Meisel agrees, “I almost take it for granted now.”
Their approach is novel, and one in which policymakers pay attention. They have been contracted to do work for a variety of countries and U.S. departments, including the National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report, which is published every four years as a guidebook of sorts for the incoming presidential administrations.
Moyer and Meisel usually respond to the pondering of a question to spark their analysis, using what they call the International Futures model that former director and DU Distinguished Professor Barry Hughes created years ago. They use public information, such as birth dates, death rates, education and health levels, and more, in which they “develop original analyses and advance conversations in the international relations space among policymakers, academics, and the public,” their website states.
“We implicitly understand that many things are connected and trends in your life and our society are broadly interrelated,” Meisel said. “An event around the world can affect gas prices and vegetable prices, … but the fact that Barry Hughes could start to model and quantify and a half century later it is still modeling and measuring it and quantifying it and it is continually improving how things are interconnected … that blows me away.”
Their work is not yet rivaled anywhere.
“I don’t know that there’s a good competitor for us. We’re pretty much the only integrated modeling shop,” Moyer said. “There’s a whole lot of good we can do here to help policy makers do a better job.”For more about their program go to: https://korbel.du.edu/pardee/content/diplometrics.
